It was not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel.

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

Art is the soul of a people.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

We have the power, knowledge, and equipment to build a world beyond our wonder. Only loss of nerve can defeat us.

All actors are looking for that role that's going to define who they are. When it happens, it's a good thing.

Be more concerned with what you can do for others than what others can do for you. You’ll be surprised at the results.

We gained a great deal of prestige, but not much money. We liked to work so much we couldn't hide it and the club owners paid us accordingly.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs.

We are the opening verse of the opening page of the chapter of endless possibilities.

I would play with Guns n' Roses anytime.

Happily, though we must each walk through life on our own, we don't have to do it alone.

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.